Monday, August 17, 2009

The Paper That Doesn’t Want to Be Free - NYTimes.com

Sign of the times… It looks like I’ll be getting most of my news from The Economist…

“It was pretty lonely out there for a while in paid land,” he said last week. “But it has become pretty clear that advertising alone is not going to sustain online business models. Quality journalism has to be paid for.”

Now The Financial Times is adding to its paid-content strategy with a plan to accept micropayments for individual articles, as an alternative to a subscription.

And one by one, other publishers are starting to see wisdom in the paper’s ways. Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of the News Corporation, said this month that the company intended to charge for all its news Web sites. That plan would have the company’s major newspapers in the United States, Britain and Australia joining their sister newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, which already charges for access to most of its site.